The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

She turned away from his reddening face and slipped through the opening just before the guards slammed the gates shut.

“What was that about?” asked Bilad.

“I told him the priests ought to serve better food on the long walk.”

Several of the women laughed nervously. No one moved. The trees sighed, and in their rustling whispered regret, despair, exhaustion, fragility, worthlessness, fear, pain, defeat, surrender. The sun began its slow descent across the vast expanse of the sky. Looking out over the land falling away westward was like being able to see into forever. But they didn’t belong to that world anymore.

She turned her back on the life she’d lived and set off along the trail. Her limbs felt wooden, graceless, heavy, but the lure of dragons pulled her on.

The others reluctantly shuffled after, deeper into the disturbing silence. Although the branches had no leaves, the trees’ eerie canopy nevertheless blocked the sun’s rays. They followed the trail along a path wrapped in an intangible shroud that sucked away all noise and most light. No birds sang or insects buzzed. Not a single flower bloomed although it was midsummer.

In the dimness, it was just possible to see strange shapes warping the trunks with bulges and decaying mounds. Now that Asvi walked through the wood, she saw these were not ordinary trees. They too were ghouls, akin to the creatures who had pulled the corpse wagons. They grew out of bodies, eating the flesh and building a scaffolding out of the skeletons to stretch toward the everlasting sky.

Their presence troubled Asvi like a boil burning hot in her gut. What if they reached out with their swaying branches to yank her into their midst? They flourished because they fed on the dying flesh and abandoned magic of discarded women.

Were these trees what it really meant to feed the dragons? That women walked so far and suffered so much fear and exhaustion only to become food for ghouls? Why not just feed the doomed women to the hauling beasts and be done with the facade of ceremony? The false promise of noble sacrifice?

Bitterly her heart soured and raged. It wasn’t fair or right. Danis had been correct about that. Maybe Danis would find a way to change things back home as Asvi could never have done.

Yet the part of her mind that measured ingredients and portions nudged her fear and anger aside. There weren’t enough trees to account for all the years and generations of the long walk. The women hadn’t all died here, short of their unseen goal.

“Keep walking and don’t stop or pause at all.” She herded them onward when their steps lagged as they stared around in fear and despair.

Light marked the end of the trail’s tunnel. A gulf of brightness awaited them, so fierce it was hard to look as they came closer. A person could drown in such light. Her heart beat faster. Her steps picked up as if she were going to meet the long-sought lover she had never had.

She emerged from the trees at the edge of a cliff face, a sheer, dizzying drop-off overlooking a staggering height. What she had thought from a distance must be a shallow fissure was a crevasse far too wide to shoot an arrow across and so deep she could not see its bottom. Thorn-gast ran like a fence along the far cliffside, and behind them grew beech, sycamore, and fir. Beyond the treetops in the most incongruous manner imaginable rose a watchtower. Threads of smoke rose from chimneys, marking a fort or settlement impossible to see from this distance and angle.

“There’s someone living over there but no way across,” said Bilad, coming up beside her.

Vicara fell to her knees, too drained even to weep. “What do we do now? Must we walk back into the trees? Is that the death that awaits us after all? To rot on the earth like discarded trash? Not even anything glorious?”

But Kvivim said, “Look! Demons!”

Because she was so bent over with age, the old woman was looking down into the crevasse. Gleaming colors churned far below within a sea of changeable fog caught in the fathomless abyss. Lean shadows flicked through the fog like fish swimming in murky waters. At first it seemed the demons were swimming away, but then the shapes flashed around and swarmed back toward the cliff face. They had scented the women.

A long, sinuous body rippled through the mist, colors shining in its wake. It was many times the length of the longest of the demon shadows. Its head, like a spear’s point, thrust up out of the fog, scales gleaming with the variegated colors of polished amber. Slender whiskers whipped, tasting the air. Then it plunged back beneath the surface and drove forward, coming up behind the demons and swallowing them whole.

Its body vanished from sight, diving deep into the obscuring fog.

“Gods bless us,” whispered Bilad.

The fog settled to become a still, opaque skin. Then it began again to churn as something huge ascended toward the surface. The dragon emerged out of the fog headfirst, the rest of its massive body following after. It coiled skyward in a spiral, leaving a trail of color in its wake.

All the women fell to their knees except Asvi. She stared with a hand pressed to her heart as the dragon flew on shining wings up out of the crevasse’s depths. It rose past them, so bright she had to shade her eyes, then swooped down to hover impossibly in the air more like a delicate hummingbird than a massive beast. Its eyes were great round brass sheets slit with lozenges of pure black. Its wings thrummed with the beat of a drum through their hearts. It opened its jaw wide and wider still until the lower part of its muzzle slammed into the edge of the fissure with a weight that shuddered through their feet.

Vicara leaped to her feet and turned, taking a step to run back into the wood. The path was gone, vanished, only a wall of deathly trees waiting to consume them. Bilad grabbed Vicara’s arm and dragged her to a halt.

“Wait,” said Asvi.

The dragon’s gleaming body elongated, stretching out and out across the gulf until the tip of its tail caught the far side and hooked there. Impossibly, through the gaping mouth appeared not a dark gullet simmering with banked fire but a translucent veil whose shimmering curtain gave onto a bridge made by the dragon’s glistening back.

“I can’t,” said Vicara. “I’d rather die here.”

Asvi looked into the eyes of the dragon, but the slits had closed. The creature had gone utterly still, almost lifeless. Its body created a solid span arching over the chasm to the shore beyond, which was dragon country, a place men dared not walk. Once across, no one could return.

Yet, even though to think of this was a fearful thing, curiosity tugged at her, like wondering if a new spice would flavor the food or if it was poison. She had grown so far beyond the first step she had taken out of the parlor that she didn’t at first recognize the shod foot—​her own!—​as she set it down onto a surface hard as tile.

If she looked back she would not go forward, so she did not look back. The span of its back had no railing. An acrid wind curled up from the depths to tug at her skirt and hair. Even stretching out her arms to either side, she could not measure the breadth of its torso. Where its spine should have lifted up along its back, there was instead a dip, like an inverted spine, as if she were in truth walking down a monstrously long gullet whose wall was invisible to her gaze. When she reached the midpoint she dared look to either side along the length of the crevasse. To the north, appearing like a child’s toy blocks, stood the temple tucked against the edge of the chasm. Glittering metal ladders linked down to caves hewn into the rock face. To the south, even farther away and visible only because of a rainbow spill of magic like a waterfall pouring down from the cave mouths into the fog, stood another temple. This was also what they meant when they said the dead protected the living, the secret knowledge the priests held to themselves and with which they ruled over the prince.